Contran-wise
Stephen Koss 01.,11•••
Joseph Chamberlain Richard Jay (Oxford University Press pp.383, £16.95) One by one, the political giants of the Victorian age have been emerging from their biographical sepulchres to haunt la tter-day historians. Joseph Chamberlain, whom 3. L. Garvin and Julian Amery embalmed in six reverent volumes, is but the latest to rise from his tomb. Lord Randolph Churchill is due to follow shortly With assistance from Roy Foster, whose approach (as previewed in a recent number of the Times Literary Supplement) has the requisite quality of clinical detachment. Richard Jay is not the first modern scholar to try his hand at resurrecting Chamberlain: nor is he likely to be the last, for Peter Marsh, an accomplished student of Lord Salisbury's domestic statescraft, is readying yet another appraisal. Meanwhile, Jay's interpretation, bold and incisive, holds the field. Written with an astringency that occasionally slips into asperity, and none the worse for that, it IS explicitly 'a political study' and makes no Pretence to being a full-scale 'life'. Originally a. nnounced by another publisher for a series on British political biography, it does not purport to belong to that intermediate genre.
Instead, Jay has systematically subordin ated the private man to the public figure in order to provide a detailed analysis of the constant interplay between Chamberlain and events. The method has its virtues, but also certain obvious disadvantages, which arguably weigh less in Chamberlain's very special case. A self-made screw manufacturer, who bred hothouse orchids and always wore one in his lapel, Chamberlain transcended his background, though he never hesitated to exploit it. To an extent matched only by Disraeli, he was a man of the moment, whose long and tortuous career was rooted in nothing so much as a churning ambition.
Given that the enterprise succeeds so well on its own terms, it would be unfair to fault the author for having failed to write a different sort of book. Nevertheless, one would like to know more about Chamberlain's Unitarian background, if only to discount it, and about his business activi ties, if only to consider allegations that he profiteered during the Boer War. The format of 'a political study' enables Jay to deal succinctly with his subject's tactical calculations, but somewhat at the expense of other politicians, who are reduced to two-dimensional personalities. Churchill and Balfour are both handled with notable skill, and the Chamberlain-Dilke rela tionship is unravelled in a useful appendix. Yet Gladstone and Salisbury remain card board characters in the drama while, at a less exalted level, it is difficult to gauge the significance, much less the basis, of Cham berlain's fitful collaborations with Morley and L,abouchere, Harcourt and Rosebery, or such journalistic henchmen as Bunce and Pearson.
Jay might have made matters easier for himself — and for his readers — had he imposed some unifying theme upon his subject's actions or, failing that, upon his motives. To the contrary, and quite convin cingly, he has chosen to emphasise the elements of disjunction. Not for him 'the ultimately fruitless task of providing Cham berlain with perfect consistency throughout his career'. Come to that, imperfect consistency would be asking too much. Recognising that Chamberlain was 'unpredictable and unreliable', Jay ventures only so far as to discern an underlying 'character and style' which, he insists, 'should not be regarded as negligible factors'. Nor, in the final reckoning, should they be counted as assets.
'On every committee of thirteen', Chamberlain once hypothesised, 'there are twelve who go to the meetings having given no thought to the subject, and prepared to accept some one else's lead. One goes having made up his mind what he means shall be done. I always make it my business to be that one.' From the late 1860s, when he laid the foundations for his power-base in Birmingham, until his incapacitating stroke in 1906, Chamberlain was Number Thirteen, seemingly oblivious to the unlucky connotation. The composition of the committees changed, as did their agendas. But Chamberlain invariably responded with the same determination to prevail. Selfmastery was not only his technique, but also — as Margot Asquith observed — his idiosyncrasy.
• Ideology, on the other hand, was never Chamberlain's strong suit, and Jay surely exaggerates by placing him 'in direct line of descent from Jeremy Bentham's school of Philosophic Radicals' and by suggesting that Chamberlain's Irish views were more akin to those of John Stuart Mill than were either Gladstone's or Morley's. Fortunate ly, such theorising is held to a minimum. Quick to attune himself to changing par liamentary circumstances, and quicker still to sense the popular mood, Chamberlain adopted policies for their value as 'lever age'. Whether he understood the larger implications, including the economic consequences of protectionism, is a moot point.
Whatever view he held (if any) and whatev er principle was at stake, 'he rarely moved without an incentive provided by the ba lance of political forces in his immediate environment'. His transparent opportunism evoked greater distrust than affection — 'Does anyone love Mr Chamberlain?' asked Salisbury — and thus ensured his endless fascination.
The contradictions are truly staggering. Chamberlain entered the national arena with an eagerness to join in 'smashing up' the Liberal Party and with a professed belief that the Republic was nigh. His social programme, based on `municipalisation' rather than 'collectivism', bore less relevance in a wider sphere and, besides, threatened to impede his 'path of personal advancement. . . into a Gladstonian, Whigdominated, Liberal government'. Without severing the sentimental bonds, he effectively divorced himself from the sectional interests with which he had been identified. Always on the lookout for 'a new departure', especially if it implied 'a chance to strengthen his position', he waited impatiently for Gladstone to retire. Preparing for that overdue eventuality, he attended to his publicity apparatus and participated actively in cabinet squabbles, not a few of which he helped to provoke.
Apart from admiring Disraeli's purchase of the Suez Canal shares as 'a clever thing', he gave no early sign of a latent imperialism. 'For us the whole of South Africa is a burden', he wrote in 1885 to Bismarck's son; 'if I had had to deal with you I should have said that we would have seen with pleasure Germany establishing herself in Africa.' About the same time, he awoke to Liberalism's Palmerstonian inheritance. The ensuing conflict over Irish Home Rule afforded him a new rhetoric, but failed to reveal any coherent vision of imperial unification. Put simply, Chamberlain recoiled at the prospect of committing the party, under Gladstone's renewed leadership, to the liability of 'a minority cause'. At least initially, he declared his opposition with an aim `to dictate his own terms for participation in any new party structure'. Instrumental though he was in defeating Gladstone's Bill, his intention 'to be the pivot around which the re-formation of a Liberal coalition would be undertaken' doomed him to isolation.
He was more successful in 'playing a pivotal role in the new Unionist grouping' that took shape after 1886; but he vacillated in his strategy, and his goals 'remained systematically ambiguous'. The Liberal Unionist machine, which he improvised into existence, was ramshackle. The paradox, as grasped by the cartoonist 'Spy', was that Chamberlain's 'influence accumulates as his party decays'. Jay does well to remind us that, 'for a politician who devoted such time and energy to the detailed mechanics of politics', Chamberlain was perpetually 'unable to accommodate himself entirely to the main ideological forms in terms of which party debate proceeded, and incapable of operating successfully within the institutional structures available'.
Liberal Unionism, a halfway house on the road to Conservatism, subjected him to a different set of constraints. He might boast that his colleagues in the Salisbury administration had implemented his 'unauthorised programme' of 1885, but he must have known better. At the Colonial Office, which he transformed into the hub of ministerial activity, he worked to 'peg out claims for posterity', both territorial and personal. Fancying his supposed resemblance to the younger Pitt, who had sported neither a monocle nor an orchid, Chamberlain pursued his relentless quest for power and prestige. 'Dissatisfied with his role in British politics', he first 'set on becoming an imperial statesman' and eventually launched his self-destructive campaign for Tariff Reform, 'a too-simple panacea for the problems of decline in Britain's old staple industries'.
The most forlorn of Chamberlain's many lost causes, this final agitation seemed to confirm this reputation as a wrecker. By the time of his death in 1914, he was a relic, whose influence was restricted to a handful of 'minor political actors', whose son Austen had apparently forsaken his cause, and whose young American wife had turned for solace to a Nonconformist clergyman, whom she soon married. However, Jay does not end on a negative note. In a trenchant 'concluding essay', he draws together the divergent strands and lengthens his perspective. A failure by the impossible standards he set for himself, Chamberlain receives credit for having 'identified successively. . as objects for creative and imaginative political action' the various phenomena which menaced and later undermined the stable certainties of mid-Victorian liberal England'. Not least among his longterm contributions, he 'laid the seeds for identifying' postwar Conservatism 'with an ideology of a reformist capitalism which has proved its central modern image'. If so, perhaps Chamberlain functions nowadays as an ectoplasmic thirteenth member of Mrs Thatcher's Cabinet.
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